Hatched
by mystiri1
Summary: One-shot. The Lifestream was not big enough to contain Zack. And Aeris had a bizarre sense of humour. Zack/Cloud, chocobos, mild crack. Sort of shounen-ai.


**A/N:** Written for Kinkfest, with this prompt: Zack/Cloud, chocobos – The big, strong black, guarding his gold mate and their nest. Realistically, this should be all the warnings anyone needs.

* * *

They were almost inseparable from the moment the little gold first cracked its shell. The black chick had hatched just a few weeks earlier, and already his parent's nest was too small to contain him. Instead, he explored every inch of the nesting ground, and the excitement about one nest drew his attention immediately.

He peeked over the edge to see an egg rocking frantically, while its parents watched and waited, trilling in a mixture of nervous excitement and encouragement. He scrabbled up the side of the nest for a better look when a little beak poked its way through the first hole, and stopped to catch its breath. He leaned in close when the struggles resumed, and only a quick shove from the mother hen prevented any irreparable accidents from happening as the shell finally separated into two pieces to show a wet little chick sitting in the wreckage. The first thing the little gold saw was its mother, but the second was a curious head with a spiky black crest peering around her, because she was blocking his view.

With the black chick for an example, the nest didn't hold the little gold for long either. By the time the flock left the nesting grounds, the pair of them were already well-known to all of the adult birds, because if there was trouble, the two of them would find it. It worried their parents, because chocobos were favoured targets for a lot of predators, and the outside world was far less forgiving than the nesting grounds.

But if their combined curiosity and lack of fear got them into trouble, it also seemed to do quite well for getting them out of it. The black grew quickly, and became known as a formidable fighter. The gold remained smaller, but would gamely follow wherever the black led, and didn't hesitate to take on any monster that tried to mess with flock or friend. Getting the two of them to run when fighting wasn't necessary was hard, and getting them to stop running was harder still as both of them had a love of speed that would take them halfway across the continent if left unchecked.

They were nearing physical maturity when they both finally remembered. It came to them in dreams, and when they woke up it was with the knowledge of who they were, and who they had been in the past.

The first thing Cloud said was, "This is all. Your. Fault."

"Hey," Zack protested. "What makes you think it's my fault?"

"Because the only time Aeris sends us back without a specific task to do is when you've been causing too much trouble."

It was true. They'd been sent back maybe a dozen times so far; twice they'd been reincarnated in order to deal with some problem or another that Aeris had sensed coming, but she was more likely to send them back as summons when that was the case because it was rare she had that much notice. They'd been reincarnated another three times because sooner or later Zack got restless, and a restless Zack was trouble waiting to happen.

The downside to that was that Aeris never came along. She was too busy in her role as the Planet's guardian to take the opportunity to enjoy all the pleasures of a lifetime with them. Both of them were determined that one day that would change, but for now, that was just how things were. Time passed differently in the Lifestream, but she'd still miss them while they were gone, even if she did keep an eye on them.

As they had no doubt she was now.

"I didn't do anything," Zack grumbled, although he honestly wasn't sure. There were still a lot of memories to sort through. "And the chocobo bit is more likely to be your fault."

"Mine? How did you reach that conclusion?" Cloud's feathers bristled.

"She was probably thinking, 'Hey, let's send Cloud and Zack back for another reincarnation,' saw your hair, and got confused," Zack said, nonchalantly balancing on one taloned foot to scratch at his head with the other.

"My hair does not look like a chocobo's!" Cloud screeched, crest standing straight up. Of course, this was not a good argument to make under the present circumstances, and Zack nearly toppled over laughing.

The argument was revisited when full maturity brought with it the discovery that Cloud was a female chocobo. Cloud thought this was horribly unfair, because it was Zack's fault they were here, and surely that meant Zack should be the girl. But he was willing to concede that the sight of Zack doing a mating dance was more than enough to make up for it. As well as providing enough blackmail material for the next three lifetimes.

He was going to have a stern talk to Aeris about the egg-laying thing, though.

There were three, and he was a little anxious about it all. The first of them was noticeably larger than the others, the last noticeably smaller. Were they all healthy? Would they hatch alright? Zack preened over the fact that he'd sired three eggs in one go, until Cloud pecked him because _he'd_ been the one to do all the work, but even he had his nervous moments. Somehow, in all their lifetimes, they'd never been parents before.

For all his worries, Cloud had to admit there was something very _right _about how it felt to sit on the eggs while Zack watched over the nest protectively. It was a comfortable kind of feeling.

Finally the day came when the eggs began to rock, cracks appearing in pristine white shell. The pair hovered anxiously, chirping encouragement, but they both fell silent when the eggs split, one after the other, to reveal three damp little silvery-white bundles of feathers, staring at them with overly large green eyes.

It was the other bane of Aeris' eternal existence.

"She didn't," Cloud groaned, a very strange sound coming from a beak.

"She did," Zack countered, staring at the three little chicks currently watching Cloud with rapt attention. "I wonder what they did to annoy her this time."

Funny how Zack didn't question for a minute that the _triplets_ had been sent back for causing trouble, Cloud noted.

"I guess they're ours now, anyway. This time around, at least." Zack's flattened crest didn't quite match the confidence of his words.

Cloud looked at the chicks, currently extremely cute and harmless-looking, then ruffled his feathers and sighed. "Fine. But I swear, Zack, the first time one of them calls me 'Mother'…"


End file.
